Shadows and Echoes
by hobgoblinn
Summary: The past informs the present, or Vice versa. A dream fragment, post "The Gift." Giles. Challenge response for Wenchie's Monday Morning Challenge 59 Shadows from March 2005. Oneshot. Note: title change only.


Title: Shadows and Echoes

Author: hobgoblinn

Rating: FRT

Spoilers/setting: Post Season 5, "The Gift"

Summary: The past informs the present, or Vice versa. Challenge response for Wenchie's Monday Morning Challenge #59 Shadows (from 3/21/05)

Disclaimer: I own nothing in the Buffyverse. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Strictly for entertainment, and no profit is being made. Please sue somebody else.

Distribution: If you're planning on asking me, I'm planning on saying "yes." Just let me know where it's going.

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Rupert Giles found himself in a familiar damp stairwell. The ancient stones of the narrow passage radiated the cold of what had been quite a beastly winter-- or, more accurately, the cold of winters these five hundred years past. He heard whispered voices around him-- that was familiar, too. The light was too dim to make out the details of the shadowy form in front of him, but as it began to descend, he followed. When they emerged into the light, he realized he was in a church of some kind. As he stood in his place he couldn't shake the nagging feeling that everything seemed a little off. Not any one thing, but a multitude of little details that caught the Watcher's attention and sent his mind searching through decades of experience and training. He was still searching as the pipe organ began a stately processional hymn and the queue in front of him began to move.

He fell into step automatically. Looking down, he saw a well-worn music folder in small, sweaty hands. He was dressed in the crisp white ruff and red robe of a chorister. Candles borne by the much taller altar boys flickered off his glasses. Everyone and everything around him seemed much larger than he. The view from his glasses seemed altered, too, as if the frame were a different shape than the one through which he normally viewed the world. He felt hair brush lightly against his forehead just above his eyebrows as he moved, as if it were longer than he wore it now.

There were smells, too: incense drifting through the air. The leather and musty paper smell of his music folder. And sounds: the final cadence of the organ introduction, and then the pure liquid echoes of the chorus around him. He heard the seamless blend of boy trebles and adult tenors and basses, perfectly tuned and soaring above the organ in the cavernous space. He heard his own voice then, not deep and warm as he thought it should be, but innocent and achingly beautiful, clear as the starry night sky he knew, rather than saw, to be hanging outside the darkened stained glass of the windows as he passed down the center aisle.

He shuffled to his place in the choir stalls, trying to place this unusually vivid memory. Glancing up, he saw his eldest sister, sunlight streaming in her hair, threading her white clad arm through their father's formally-attired black one. The anomaly of the sunlight streaming from the night sky bewildered him even more. Glancing to the communion rail, he saw his brother in law Charlie taking his place next to another earnest young chap whose name Rupert had long since forgotten. They all seemed so terribly young.

With a start, Rupert realized he remembered this day. For it had been on a cloudless spring morning some forty years ago that his sister Ellen had married. Watchers, of all people, knew better than to hold their significant personal events after sundown. The flickering of candles and the dark shadows of the old stone church flashed and changed to the sunlight he remembered streaming through jewel-like windows, then shifted back again bewilderingly. The man whose mind was processing these events could feel the boy's nervous excitement, and he remembered with another start that he had been the soloist on that bright day so many years ago, just as the tenor began the anthem:

_Set me as a seal upon thine heart..._

Rupert opened and fumbled through his music, just as he had all those years ago, thanking all the gods that the tenor solo gave him the seconds he needed to find his place in time to echo with the rest of the choir. The hushed chord at the end of the phrase tapered off as the tenor continued:

_As a seal upon thine arm..._

Once again, he echoed with the others, remembering his first puzzled reaction to the piece. It was hauntingly beautiful, but it seemed so sad for such a joyous occasion, and the text made not the slightest sense to him. The tenor continued,

_For love is strong as death..._

The chorus echoed, then repeated the thought with rising, then falling certainty and volume. The chorus continued to sink into polyphonic waters as the text continued now in all voices:

_Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it... _

The chorus restated the opening command and held the breathless chord as Rupert's clear voice soared the answer above them:

_Set me as a seal upon thine heart/ As a seal upon thine arm... _

Finally, the chorus wound its way to the conclusion like waters lapping gently against a still lakeshore, fading to a quiet but emphatic statement of truth:

_For love is strong as death. _

By the time the final chords had faded away, tears were coursing down his hot cheeks, and when the priest rose to continue the service he slipped silently from his place and out of the sanctuary through the sacristy door.

Outside, the night air was crisp and cool, and he shivered as he sank back against the stone of the door, as much from the cold as from a knowledge of so many things he hadn't an inkling of, those many years ago. He gazed out into the moonlit churchyard, not the one he had chased through with his mates after morning services when he was seven, but one he had patrolled countless times with his Slayer, and which now housed her earthly remains. He did not need to walk closer to make out the stone in the shady grove on the other side of the cemetery. A man's heart beat now within his small frame, and he knew now without doubt, what the song had been about. And that it was true. _Many waters cannot quench love... For love is strong as death._

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A/N The piece of music which inspired this fic is William Walton's "Set me as a Seal," for mixed chorus, tenor and soprano soloists. This story was a fragment of another fic that I abandoned early on, then reworked for Wenchie's Challenge. I recently ran across it in some old papers and revised it a bit. But this is mostly a good indication of where I was 2 years ago, and it looks like I've come a ways since then. That's kind of comforting. 


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